A week ago we posted on our Twitter a photo of one of the stray dogs that kept following us in Chernobyl. As is usually the case with photos of dogs and cats, the Internet was instantly filled with love. However, a few of you were quite surprised. Are stray dogs living in Chernobyl? Yes, they are. Many of them, actually.
After the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986, about 120,000 people were evacuated. They were told they would be able to return to their homes in 3 days, but that was not the case. And the worst part: the residents could not take their pets with them.
After the evacuation of Pripyat and the Exclusion Zone in the spring of 1986, Soviet Army soldiers were sent to shoot and kill the animals left behind (reportedly, residents left note cards on the door with pleas to spare their animals). However, it was not possible to catch and slaughter all the animals in the entire Exclusion Zone. After a while, they migrated to the area surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, where their descendants remain to this day.
It is estimated that several hundred homeless dogs live in Chernobyl and its vicinity (there are also cats, several times less than dogs). However, despite the generational history, it cannot be concluded that it’s an ideal place for them to live. The greatest threat to the animals is not only radiation, but above all the lack of food and harsh winters. Most dogs simply freeze or are unable to cope with the competition for survival with other, stronger animals (dogs are driven from the forest to the power plant by packs of wolves). It is hard to find dogs older than 6 years; most rarely live longer than 4-5 years.
Every year, new puppies are born, which are taken care of by employees of the power plant: they feed them with the remains of their own meals, bring them indoors so that they can survive the harsh Ukrainian winter, and treat their wounds. At the same time they expose themselves to rabies by interacting with dogs. In total, it is estimated that more than 3,500 people interact with more than 500 stray dogs roaming the power plant site.
Dogs are also supported by guides. They set up small shelters where the animals can eat leftover food and find a place to sleep during the cold nights. However, these people wish they could get more humanitarian support for these animals.
But the power plant workers and zone guides are not the only help that Chernobyl dogs can receive. The American non-profit organization Clean Futures Fund (dealing, among other things, with veterinary assistance for dogs living in the exclusion zone) has launched the Dogs of Chernobyl program. Its goal is to reduce the population of Chernobyl dogs by sterilizing them. In addition, the animals undergo medical examinations and vaccinations. The program also includes cats that also require care. The authors of the project claim that for the last several years they have observed a drastic decrease in the number of stray animals inhabiting the zone, which means less suffering.
One more question that begs answering: can Chernobyl dogs be petted? Although quadrupeds are generally friendly towards zone tourists and the temptation is huge, it is worth sticking to the applicable rules and keeping your hands to yourself.
We are slowly recovering from the New Year's Eve festivities and planning brand new content for the coming months of 2023. We are preparing for you a lot of new and interesting things related (but not limited) to Chernobylite ;)
For a good start, it's worth paying attention to our YouTube channel this year, which we've been rebuilding for over a month. In conversations with our community, we noticed that Chernobylite is often a kind of catalyst: you play the game and then you want to know more about the Exclusion Zone. Therefore, after internal talks, we came to the conclusion that we will share this knowledge with you. This was partly done in Reports, so why not try it on a larger scale, in a more accessible and also eye-pleasing form? Since then, we have been publishing scientific materials focused on topics around the Chernobyl zone quite regularly.
In the first material, we introduced the topic of the Chernobyl power plant disaster with specific numbers. Thanks to this, we were able to better explain the most important issue in the most understandable way.
The second material was definitely more difficult. It concerns the history of liquidators - people who sacrificed their health and lives to remove the effects of the catastrophe.
In the next video, we presented the profile of Valery Legasov: the scientist who was given the extremely important task of investigating the causes of the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
This movie is one of our favourites. We approach the HBO Chernobyl series by asking the question: how close is this series to reality?
Now it’s time for some chemistry lessons. We answer various questions about radiation in Chernobyl, e.g. how far does the radiation reach, what is the risk of contact with it, where does it come from, etc.
Another video will be released on our channel today. We won't spoil too much, you have to see for yourself ;)
With the New Year just around the corner we will devote these last hours of 2022 to make a short summary of what happened in the last 12 months.
Last year was as intense for us as the previous one. We started it with a bang: the announcement of free content for Chernobylite. When the game was in Early Access, we promised you that we would support the game by adding a lot of free and paid content to it. Words must be kept. That's why throughout the year you received a solid package of fresh content as Enhanced Edition: new locations, weapons, events, as well as new game modes. And it's all for free! We also have added some cool paid content like weapon skins and decorations for the base. Of course, we don't stop there - in 2023 we will launch the 4th (and the last) Season called "Black Smoke". What will it contain? You will find out soon ;)
We also introduced some changes to the Weekly Reports. Preparing weekly entries is a pleasant task, although with a certain caveat: we have to answer the question "what players would like to read about" all the time. Sure, we could tease you about the content of the next DLCs over and over again, but we know from experience that after a while you would quickly get fed up. We would probably too. That's why we ensured a lot of variety.
Therefore, in the Reports you could learn about key elements of the game (not only parts of DLC), interesting facts related to development, the backstage of the game, from the smallest details to larger initiatives (e.g. a trip to Ukraine for new materials like Cooling Towers). We also presented to you some previously unpublished materials, as well as broader descriptions of historical and scientific curiosities included in the game. You also learned about various inspirations for the creation of Chernobylite. There was a lot of it, and we enjoyed your lively reactions to Weekly Reports' varied content. We will not be slowing down next year either.
The year 2022 was very important to us, especially for one reason. For many months, the eyes of the whole world have been focused on Ukraine. The moment we heard about the outbreak of war, our hearts broke. We have been going to Ukraine for years and met many amazing people there. While creating our game, we got very close to Ukrainians, their history and culture. We couldn't stand idle. We launched fundraisers, we contacted people we could help, we also helped innocent civilians who seeked help while escaping the war. All this would not have been possible without your support, our faithful community. For your support - moral and material - you deserve a huge thank you!
Before we get to the report, a quick announcement!
We invite you to subscribe to our YouTube channel, where we will regularly publish videos dedicated not only to Chernobylite, but everything related to it.
Hello Stalkers!
Like we mentioned in the last report describing the history of the Mi-8 helicopter accident, there are still wrecks of various vehicles in the Zone. Helicopters account for only a percentage of those wrecks. We even managed to digitally capture some of them for Chernobylite, as you can see in the pictures below:
But believe us, what you see in the game is just the tip of the iceberg. Come with us! We will show you around the largest vehicle cemeteries in the Exclusion Zone.
Liquidation of the Chernobyl disaster, evacuation of the population, decontamination of the vicinity of the power plant and the 30-kilometer zone, construction of the Sarcophagus - these are just some of the tasks that required the involvement of over half a million people. A huge number of vehicles was also needed to conduct those operations. Today, many of them rest near Chernobyl and Pripyat, covered with rust, irradiated, unfit for use.
There are quite a few places where you can find large concentrations of abandoned vehicles in the Zone. One of the more famous is the vehicle graveyard “Buriakivka” in Chernobyl, some 4 kilometers from the power plant. This place was the main drop point for irradiated equipment immediately after the explosion.
"Buriakivka" was put into operation in 1987. It owes its name to the village of Buriakivka, whose inhabitants were resettled to neighboring areas after the disaster at the nuclear power plant. The burial place of the vehicles was designated and developed by scientists from the Leningrad Institute. They used drawings of designs of above-ground radioactive waste repositories as blueprints for Buriakivka. The choice of location wasn’t random either. The village is located at a sufficient distance from water bodies and settlements and it meets all the strict requirements for the storage of radioactive waste. In addition, “Buriakivka” was located on one of the hills, more than 20 meters above the groundwater. In the event of a crack in the shell of the repository excavation, radioactive substances would penetrate into it very slowly - for many hundreds of years.
The vehicle cemetery measures 1,200 x 700 meters, is surrounded by a fence and has 30 ditches in which many radioactive materials and equipment that took part in the liquidation are buried. The walls and bottom of the excavations are covered with a meter-long layer of compacted clay, acting as the main barrier. After having been placed in the trench, the radioactive materials were compacted with a bulldozer. The trench was then filled with another meter-long layer of clay, sprinkled with earth and planted with perennial grasses, thus fulfilling a protective function. The size of each such pit is 150 x 50 meters.
Another storage place for the machines was located on the site of the former German airport, near the village of Rassokha. In this place, endless rows of various military equipment were stored, including military special equipment, tractors, fire engines, Mi-8 and Mi-6 buses and helicopters. According to some sources, there were over 1,600 vehicles of various types. Rassokha was originally intended to be a PVLRO (Point of Temporary Localization of Radioactive Waste). However, cleaning the machines would take a lot of time and resources, so the easiest solution was to leave them and simply wait for the radioactive decay to lower the radiation levels on their surfaces. After sufficient time has passed, the equipment was to be deactivated, restored and restored to its intended use.
Unfortunately, this is never going to happen. Since 2000, many of these vehicles have been cut up for scrap and brought to metallurgical plants in Ukraine. Some have been plundered. In 2006, the complete liquidation process of “Rassokha” began and lasted until the end of 2012. Equipment that could not be salvaged for various reasons was transferred to “Buriakivka”. On the site of the former "Rassokha" you can still find remains of vehicles cut into pieces.
We move around the country and get close to the city of Pripyat, where we come across the abandoned Yaniv railway station, also known simply as the Yanov station. The station was built in 1925 and lies in the village of Yanov (demolished after the Chernobyl disaster), south of the city of Pripyat, and is part of the Chernihiv - Ovruch railway line.
In 1986-1987, the railway line from Chernihiv to Yanov was reconstructed to serve Chernobyl personnel. The line from Yanov to Sławutycz was also electrified. In 2000, one of the tracks passing through Yanov was restored and modernized, and then used during the construction work of Shelter-2, a new sarcophagus for the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
At the moment, the line is not used, it has even been partially dismantled. The entrance to the station building is now closed, but the area itself is not completely abandoned however. Currently, the station is owned by the state-owned enterprise "Chernobylservice". Also, some of the old wagons are used as houses for metalworkers. Currently, there is one main railway track, three shunting tracks and several maintenance tracks for the storage of old and rusty rolling stock.
The last point of our trip is the city of Pripyat itself. After the explosion at the power plant, the inhabitants had to leave their homes within a few days. Within a week, Pripyat, once a prosperous planned city, was deserted. Almost. Dozens of tanks, helicopters, armored personnel carriers and heavy trucks brought in by the military to help with the liquidation of the effects of the explosion at the power plant were left on the site. There are still plenty of them.
However, the most famous place where you can find wrecks of vehicles is the garage of the previously mentioned state-owned enterprise “Chernobylservice”. This is the truest museum of abandoned heavy engineering vehicles in Pripyat. Trucks, tanks and machines are slowly rusting and falling apart in the parking lot of an old garage. Previously it was a car repair shop where locals brought their Ladas and Volga cars for repair. After the explosion at the power plant, the site was taken over by the “Chernobylservice” and was used to store the vehicles that were used to clean up the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
fot. UrbEx.nl
We are not exaggerating when we call this place a museum. There you can find ZIL and MAZ-537 trucks and even the IMR-2 tank. The IMR was an armored engineering vehicle based on the chassis of the Soviet T-55 tank. It's a sight to behold.
Today, all these places look impressive - as if taken straight out of a post-apocalyptic picture. And we had the opportunity to see them with our own eyes.
On the occasion of the upcoming Christmas and New Year, we are starting a special winter sale. In this special offer you will be able to buy Chernobylite: Enhanced Edition for half the price!
But it is not everything! The 50% discount also applies to all DLCs for the game:
Before we get to the report, a quick announcement!
We invite you to subscribe to our YouTube channel, where we will regularly publish videos dedicated not only to Chernobylite, but everything related to it.
Hello Stalkers!
While traveling through the Exclusion Zone in Chernobylite, you can come across the wrecks of various vehicles, from cars, trucks, to trains. Someday we will write more about transport in the area around Chernobyl, because this topic is itself fascinating. But for now, we want to focus your attention on something else. If you go to the north-western edge of the Red Forest or Pripyat Central maps, you will come across a helicopter wrecks. Some might say that we've gone a bit overboard with this "differentiation" of the map, and also, that this beautiful picture is still missing a wreck of, let’s say, a Mechagodzilla. However, believe us, the presence of these helicopters in the Zone is justified.
As is well known, the explosion at the Chernobyl power plant caused a massive fire in the reactor core, which in turn led to the release and dissemination of radioactive substances in the air. In response, the Soviet military called in an armada of Mil Mi-8 helicopters to drop radiation-absorbing materials onto the burning heap. Several hundred pilots were called in to make short flights over the power plant. It was a huge risk, because they often had to fly into the clouds of radioactive smoke coming from the inside of the power plant. At the end of the initial phase of extinguishing the fire, it turned out that the pilots received doses of radiation that were completely beyond the scale of their dosimeters and potentially lethal.
At the same time, the Ukrainian director and documentary filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko appears at the power plant site. He was granted permission by the authorities to enter the charred remains of the Chernobyl power plant in order to film attempts to seal the building's open wound caused by the reactor meltdown. He used this footage to create the documentary Chernobyl: Chronicle of Difficult Weeks. While reviewing the recordings, Shevchenko noticed flashes and spots on them. At first he thought it was a mere technical defect in the film material, but later it turned out that the radiation was degrading the roll of film. Chernobyl: Chronicle of Difficult Weeks was named "the most dangerous reel of film ever", and the camera used for filming had to be locked in a lead-lined casket and stored in one of the locked facilities near Kiev.
It was the Shevchenko camera that captured the most shocking accident that occurred during the firefighting. During the flight to pour the extinguishing substance on Block 4, the helicopter controlled by Vladimir Vorobyov caught the propellers on the cable of the high-rise crane and fell to the ground. All crew members died on the spot.
This moment was very faithfully recreated in the HBO series Chernobyl.
In 2017, during the disassembly of the lightweight ceiling of the engine room of unit 4 of the power plant, a fragment of the tail with broken elements of the Mi-8 helicopter's steering propeller was found. A memorial to the fallen pilots has been erected near the Chernobyl helipad. The possibility of recovering and decontaminating a fragment of the caudal fin in order to use it as a museum specimen is being considered.
Vladimir Shevchenko died in March 1987 from radiation he received while filming in Chernobyl.
Before we get to the report, a quick announcement!
We invite you to subscribe to our YouTube channel, where we will regularly publish videos dedicated not only to Chernobylite, but everything related to it.
Hello Stalkers!
Last week we explained what chernobylite is (it turned out to be much more than a fancy name for the game). Furthermore we elaborated about the chemical effects of the explosion of the Chernobyl power plant. These are not the only curiosities we have prepared for you - expect them in the next reports ;) In today's report, we don't deviate so much from the topic of chernobylite crystals, because we used them to build something important for the whole game.
Those of you who played Chernobylite in Early Access remember well what the fractal world looked like before the final release of the game - like a huge green space with huge crystal columns spreading across the width and length.
Of course, the appearance was the result of the evolution of our many experiments. We went from designing a large sphere for the player to walk around in (which made our testers motion sick, so the idea died as soon as it was born) to a maze full of enemies. You can read more about it below.
However, the basis of our thinking when designing this extraordinary place was the basic assumption that the fractal world would be, as the name suggested, a fractal
From the Latin language, fractal means something "broken" and "particle" and is a relatively new phenomenon. For the first time you could read about it in Benoît Mandelbrot's book "The Fractal Geometry of Nature" published in 1982. According to the definition, this is the name of self-similar objects, i.e. those whose parts are similar to the whole, or show subtle details even in multiple magnification. Simply put: these are objects that can be infinitely complex and consist of identical structures. There are a whole lot of examples of such objects, which is why mathematicians avoid giving one specific definition. In fact, it is still the subject of polemics of scientists, so the definitions will only keep coming.
The subject of fractals is most closely related to mathematics, geography, physics and biology. This is especially visible in the last domain, because fractal structures are commonly found in nature. Examples include snowflakes, a blood vessel system, clouds, a coastline, rock formations, river water systems, lightning, or a young cauliflower flower.
Let's go back to Chernobylite. As we have already said, we assumed that the mysterious world that Igor finds himself in thanks to the physics and power of chernobylite will resemble a fractal in its structure. At first the place looked like an out-of-this-world planet, then like stretching columns like something out of a Windows XP screensaver.
But as it usually happens with "cool" ideas, everything went to hell. Nothing worked as it should, from the gameplay side it was indigestible and irritating in places, and even from the artistic side it did not look encouraging. Big changes had to be made, and for that we had to hurry. The only solution was to go back to the roots. To that end, we took scenes from Get Even where Black was going into his own mind and based on them we created a fractal world in Chernobylite adorned with chernobylite crystals.
Before we get to the report, a quick announcement!
We invite you to subscribe to our YouTube channel, where we will regularly publish videos dedicated not only to Chernobylite, but everything related to it.
Hello Stalkers!
In our last post showcasing the evolution of the base in Chernobylite, we took a deeper look into our archive containing materials from the early version of the game. What a trip it was! When you look back at this project and compare it with what you see today, in some places you will notice very significant differences.
For example, tables for crafting and refining weapons. Today, they look as if they were cut out alive from a professional workshop. In Early Access, they resembled tables from our grandfather's basement where you could tweak weapons through trial and error, and maybe something would come of it.
Do you remember when fractal worlds used to consist of green rectangular crystals? When you looked at them from a distance, you could get the impression that you were looking at a pile of blocks arranged in a slight disorder. Just like Jenga.
We will probably take a deeper look at all the changes that Chernobylite has undergone over the years in future reports. Of course, you can always read our previous posts, where we gave a very general overview of Chernobylite in Early Access. But if you want to learn more details about the evolution of the key elements of this project... Well, you'll have to be patient ;)
Today we would like to do something that we should have done from the beginning: answer the question: what is chernobylite? Sure, in interviews or somewhere in our previous materials, you could read that it is a substance that exists in reality and was created as a result of the explosion of the Chernobyl power plant. Now it's worth expanding on this idea a bit and... telling you about something else. Because believe it or not, you can come across some really interesting things when you read about the chemical effects of the disaster.
Chernobylite is a highly radioactive crystalline substance (a glassy material that resembles lava) consisting of zirconium silicate with an admixture of uranium. It was discovered in the basement of the reactor of the 4th nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, where it was created as a result of the melting of the nuclear reactor core.
However, chernobylite is not the only side effect of the events of April 1986. Shortly after the reactor exploded, attempts were made to put out the fire first with water, and then several thousand tons of sand, boron, dolomite, clay and lead were dropped from military helicopters, eventually extinguishing the burning graphite. There was still fuel inside the reactor, which had melted at 2,000 degrees Celsius. In this way, a mixture weighing about 250 tons was created, which consisted of uranium (about 190 tons), zirconium, graphite, concrete and other construction elements, as well as the aforementioned extinguishing agents.
The molten materials made their way to the bottom of the reactor vessel, and after a few days burned through its thick concrete base. Slowly cooling lava called corium occupied lower and lower rooms. There was a fear that the contamination would leak into the groundwater and lead to a gigantic ecological disaster. Therefore, it was decided to "inhibit" the substance on one of the lower floors of the reactor using ground freezing techniques. Thus, it was possible to stop the corium at an altitude above the groundwater level.
Half a year after the catastrophe, the exact location of the corium was established during the construction of the sarcophagus. In one of the rooms, a massive fragment of it was found in the form of a solidified, gray-orange mass that looked like an elephant's foot. Hence its name. "Elephant foot" was an extremely radioactive substance - staying in its vicinity for more than a minute was enough to cause severe radiation sickness, and more than 4 minutes meant certain death after a few days. People taking a picture of this phenomenon put their lives and health at risk.
Over time, the radiation level of the "elephant foot" has decreased (now it takes about an hour to be near it to receive a lethal dose of radiation), but it still remains one of the most radioactive and dangerous objects in the Chernobyl zone. Removal of such a huge corium deposit is impossible, and it is not known whether it will be possible to do so in this millennium!
As you can see, Chernobylite entertains and teaches. You've seen it before, and here's another proof.
Before we start, we have a little announcement for you. The Steam Autumn Sale has started! If you haven't had a chance to play Chernobylite or any of our DLCs yet, now is the perfect time! The game and DLCs are 40% off!
We also have a request for you. As every year, the nominations for The Steam Awards have started. Chernobylite isn’t a new game (more than a year has passed since its release ;)), but that doesn't mean we can't take part in this event. As our game has received a ton of huge DLC over the past year, we qualify for the "Labor of Love" category - for a game that is still supported by its developers.
To nominate Chernobylite for this category, we ask you to leave a review or update an already written one and check the appropriate box on the Steam Awards page. Thank you for all the votes and reviews! :)
Hello Stalkers!
The base in Chernobylite is a special place. You can rest there after a hard mission, talk to your companions, and replenish your equipment. And most importantly, you can decorate it as you like. From your screenshots, we can see that you don't just place beds, crafting tables and plants inside. The furniture layouts in your bases go from extreme to extreme: from well-crafted apartments to massive mushroom farms. It's obvious that you enjoy it.
The concept of the base has been with us basically from the very beginning. There were two factors behind its creation. Firstly, we like building bases ;) Secondly, simple logic: the main character ended up in the Exclusion Zone, separated from the outside world. He has a very important mission to perform, for which he must prepare. It requires time, resource gathering and a suitable base of operation. And it’s not like the protagonist can sleep on the floor. Even stalkers in real life need to find shelter if they want to survive in the Zone for more than a day. So we gave our character an abandoned warehouse that he can remodel to his liking. We also made sure that it has a large window overlooking the Zone, from where further expeditions can be planned.
The view from the base was inspired by our trip to Chernobyl. When we climbed to the top of one of the towers, we had an amazing view of the entire Zone. We thought it would be cool to create a place in our game where the player could look out the window and indicate where they would like to go each day. That's how it all started.
Of course, the appearance of the base has changed over time. Its evolution was quite… exuberant. There were a lot of changes, corrections or redesign of the entire project. The original plan was for the space to be very small (about ¼ of what you see in the final version of Chernobylite) and contain basic items like a bed. Another plan was to create rooms (e.g. companion room, kitchen, etc.) that could only be upgraded to a certain level.
The appearance of the base was constantly changing. Once everything around was too "sterile", other times we decided to give the place a more raw and gloomy look, which made the base feel quite inhospitable. Eventually we managed to strike the right balance.
Many objects placed in the base have also undergone significant changes in appearance, which you may have noticed for yourself if you played the game in Early Access.
But not only the appearance changed. Over time, the base became more than just a place to sleep. It started with adding a single weapon crafting table and to this day we’ve added so many devices, we are slowly losing count. Over time, new objects began to arrive, not only those related to the preparation for the mission. We finally reached the point where you can decorate your base like a house in The Sims. And objects also have an impact on the well-being of our companions. Just like in The Sims!
We even decided to drain the water from the lower floor of the base, which was flooded in EA. Everything to give you more space to build on.
It turned out to be the right decision, because apparently you like arranging the base your way, and our social media was flooded with photos of your "apartments" at some stage.
If you have photos from your bases, share the links in the comments :)